Four Ways to Support Leadership Development

You have put together a top-notch leadership training program – great content, facilitators and learners are involved through role plays, case analysis, and discussion. Is that enough? A strong focus on what goes on during leadership training is important for making sure your leaders acquire new knowledge and skills.  But you are likely to see uneven application of what they learned in their work.

Here are four ideas for supporting leaders’ use of what they learned by emphasizing application, accountability, and support:

1. Have your leaders prepare an action plan before they attend leadership training. The action plan should include setting one or two goals related to applying new knowledge and skills, strategies for using their knowledge and skills, identifying who will provide feedback and help them, and what the results of using the knowledge and skills will look like. It is ideal if your leaders can get their managers involved in competing their action plan, helping them implementing it, and following up on their progress. If aspiring leaders current roles don’t provide them with sufficient opportunities to use what they learned, the action plans can focus on application in non-work contexts where leadership skills are necessary such as in volunteer assignments or coaching youth sports teams.
2. Provide a peer support group or a leadership community of practice either electronically or face-to-face. Such groups keep leadership training alive by encouraging leaders to discuss what successes they have had in using leadership training, what barriers they are facing and how they have overcome them and exchange tips for skills applications.
3. Have leaders assigned to a mentor, coach or sponsor whose role is to support their use of new skills, discuss ideas, and help them implement their action plan.
4. Provide an online, easily accessible library of resources related to the leadership training that leaders can use to refresh or review what they learned.

Remember- application, accountability and support should be considered in the design of leadership training — not as an afterthought. Effective leadership training involves both learning through the experience itself and application back-on-the-job.